Hello I have been aggregating about 95 vlans into a bridge and I notice the CPU can be quite high with softnet pegged quite high in the bridge so I have an untagged ix0 interface facing the gateway of the LAN which is also an unprotected bridge port and then I have 95 Vlans as protected ports spread across 2other ix(4) interfaces,
in doing some analysis and quality checks on the network I noticed that doing a packet capture on either of my trunk ix(4) interfaces (both containing about 45 vlans each so when my gateway is broadcasting an arp request , when this enters the bridge on ix0 the kernel must copy the frame and craft 95 frames with different 802.1Q Tags on it... im wondering has anyone come across this issue before when bridging many ports together. this issue I hadn't fully considered before and I thought it might be a useful edge case for those optimising bridge forwarding. Thanks Tom Smyth -- Kindest regards, Tom Smyth.
